The Republican Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, John McCain,
is warning about foreign money influencing American elections this
year via a prominent supporter of Republican politicians.

In an interview that
aired June 14 on PBS’s Newshour program, Senator McCain
was asked about a report that the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas
Sands, Sheldon Adelson, and his wife Dr. Miriam Adelson would give
$10 million, and perhaps more, to a “superpac” supporting the
campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The exchange went like this:

JUDY WOODRUFF: This question of campaign
money highlighted today by this — the announcement that there’s a
huge amount of money coming in from one donor in the state of
Nevada.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Mr. Adelson, who gave
large amounts of money to the Gingrich campaign. And much of Mr.
Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from this casino in
Macau.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which says what?

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Which says that,
obviously, maybe in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into
an American campaign — political campaigns.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Because of the profits at
the casinos in Macau?

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Yes. That is a great
deal of money.

It may have been the lowest moment of Senator McCain’s political
career.

First, there’s the hypocrisy of it. Sen. McCain did not voice
any concern about the source of Las Vegas Sands’ profits back in
April 2008, when Adelson gave McCain’s campaign $2,300, according
to Federal Election Commission records. Nor was McCain fulminating
about foreign money in August of 2008, when his presidential
campaign got another $2,300 from Adelson, nor in September 2008,
when the McCain-Palin presidential campaign got another $2,300 from
Adelson for its compliance committee. Dr. Miriam Adelson put an
additional $18,900 into various McCain presidential
campaign-related committees in 2008, the FEC records show, again
without a publicly reported peep then out of the senator about
“foreign money.”

Second, there’s the xenophobia of it. This
is particularly tragic coming from McCain, who with Senator Edward
Kennedy had been a leader on legislation that would have done more
to welcome immigrants to America. Foreign profits are a different
thing than foreign persons who want to become Americans, but the
underlying principle—that it’s unwise to oppose something merely
because of its foreign origins—holds in both cases.

Third, there’s the Washington-based disconnect with contemporary
American business reality. It’s a global economy. You’d think that
the politicians would want to be cheering American companies making
profits overseas. Instead, Senator McCain seems to be almost
demonizing them. Las Vegas Sands is hardly an outlier. A recent US
News article says
a typical big American company makes about 40% of its profits
overseas. At General Electric, 54% of revenue is from overseas; at
IBM, 64% of revenue; Intel, 85% of revenue; McDonald’s, 66% of
revenue. If the CEO of Intel or of McDonald’s makes a political
campaign contribution, can we expect complaints to follow from
Senator McCain about “foreign money” infiltrating the American
political system?

Is McCain himself suspect because his personal wealth derives
from his wife’s family interest in a distributor of Budweiser, the
beer brand now owned by Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev N.V.?
Were all those New York Times editorials backing the
McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform suspect because the Times
also owns the International Herald Tribune, which circulates in
foreign countries, and because the New York Times Company is part
owned by the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim?

The larger point is not so much about Senator McCain, who will
be a less important national political figure going forward than he
was in 2008, as about the spirit of the campaign finance “reform”
crowd. That crowd seems determined to find a way to cast aspersions
of corruption even in cases in which there is none. The press,
which can indulge in politics to its hearts content without the
disclosures to which the Adelsons are subject, loves to advance the
narrative that, as Judy Woodruff put it, “in the wake of the
Supreme Court decision Citizens United, we are seeing
enormous sums of money going into this campaign.”

But the big Asian campaign-money scandal was
back in the 1990s, more than a decade before the Supreme Court
decision in Citizens United that supposedly
opened the spigots. Now McCain would have us believe the Chinese
(Macau is part of China) are trying (via Sheldon Adelson?) to
install Mitt Romney, a candidate who has been criticizing President
Obama for being too
soft on human rights in China and on Chinese “currency
manipulation”? It doesn’t add up. The claims of the campaign
finance “reform” crowd almost never do.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and
author of Samuel Adams: A
Life.